Gift Guide 2012: Travel

Alice Albinia recommends travel books for the holiday season.

Nov. 16, 2012 5:36 p.m. ET

Since moving back to the city after travels in rural places, I've found myself drawn to books about cities rather than intrepid journeys. Katherine Boo's "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" (Random House, 256 pages, $27) journeys into a community of ragpickers who live cheek by jowl with Bombay's airport. The constricted urban space they inhabit is in jeopardy from developers who threaten eviction. Ms. Boo's impeccable study takes in Indian politics, policing, the country's legal system and, above all, its poverty. Much of the material is familiar; it is Ms. Boo's style that is so arresting. She absents herself from the narration, and the lives of the people she encounters unfold like a novel. Her survey of the inhabitants' crises and desires is subtle, compassionate and illuminating.

Leela, the subject of Sonia Faleiro's first nonfiction book, also lives in Bombay. She works as a bar-dancer, and she sleeps with select clients for cash. "Beautiful Thing" (Black Cat, 225 pages, $15) follows Leela's changing fortunes as she tries to manage her finances, career, boyfriends and mother—and avoid returning to the village she fled from as a child. Leela is optimistic about her prospects, but Ms. Faleiro draws bleak conclusions about the chances of an impoverished single woman in a city as capricious as Bombay. Leela's chosen profession is insecure and physically debilitating. Ms. Faleiro's observant, wry portrait derives gravitas from the grim economic context in which she places Leela's struggles.

ENLARGE

Sarah J. Coleman

Another troubled city is evoked by Patrick McGuinness's debut novel, "The Last Hundred Days" (Bloomsbury, 377 pages, $17). Set in Bucharest during the months leading up to Ceaușescu's fall, the book is a riveting account of a city under siege from a corrupt and murderous regime. The narrator, a young Englishman, enjoys a series of capers through Bucharest society as Romania's social order implodes. If his encounters with pampered elites, emaciated dissidents and insouciant black marketeers strain credulity, they also conjure a warped, insular world. One of the narrator's central preoccupations is the regime's destruction of a once-famed city: "We would cross the dark, cold, kitsch-marbled squares of Ceaușescu's Bucharest using a map that told us we were in a bustling side street of cafés and cabarets." The novel marks this loss.

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts is writing a trilogy about black utopias. Harlem—another cityscape at risk of metamorphosis—is the subject of her first installment. "Harlem Is Nowhere" (Little, Brown, 289 pages, $24.99) shuns easy categorization. Ostensibly an idiosyncratic voyage through Harlem's history, it expands into an erudite, meandering, sharp-edged exploration of black America. On the one hand, it describes a young woman's encounter with local politics, inquisitive neighbors and eloquent street characters; on the other, it traces Harlem's intellectual record, its collective cultural inspiration. Ms. Rhodes-Pitts's project is a bulwark against the gentrifying interests that threaten to swallow a place that galvanized a wider culture.

Finally, a travel book in the old-fashioned mode. Olivia Laing follows the River Ouse in Sussex, in southern England, from its source to the sea. The power of "To the River" (Canongate, 283 pages, $13.95) lies in the quality of the prose, by turns lush and limpid: The river's flora and fauna, its human memories and memorials, are lovingly detailed. As Ms. Laing walks, birds turn in the air, fish mass in the waters, and thoughts of former travelers flit before her. In particular, Virginia Woolf haunts this book. Her novels had water running through them; it was in the Ouse that Woolf drowned herself in 1941. "To the River" has a distributor in the U.S. and can be purchased as an e-book. It's worth seeking out, in whatever form you can find it.

—Ms. Albinia's "Empires of the Indus" won a Somerset Maugham Award. Her first novel, "Leela's Book," was published this year.

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